


Bad Dreams from the Multiverse

by blue_bees



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Vignette, Well - Freeform, several vignettes slapped together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 09:21:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8527657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_bees/pseuds/blue_bees
Summary: Ford’s been having an awfully hard time sleeping ever since he returned to this dimension…





	1. Bad Dream #1

**Author's Note:**

> Six short bad dreams and two interludes. I usually don’t write fanfiction, but I had a series of vignettes that I thought it would be a shame to waste so I decided to type this up. Bad Dream #1 is partially inspired by Disappeareddraws’ One and A Half Stans AU on Tumblr. The only vignette containing a major character death is-spoilers-Bad Dream #4.
> 
> This was originally posted on my Tumblr account about a year ago.

Stanley is how old? Eleven, twelve? Ford is shocked by how _small_ he looks. Stanley had always been the slightly taller, larger, stronger twin. But now he looks tiny and helpless in front of a fully-grown Ford.

“You comin’, Poindexter?” he asks eagerly.

 Ford stares at him. “Coming where?”

“Treasure hunting, dummy! I fixed up our boat, an’ I boughta map with the ice-cream money I saved, an’ I’m ready to go now!” His smile is so wide, so earnest, and Ford feels a lump in his throat.

“I can’t.”

The grin crumples a bit. “You can’t? But why not?”

“Look, Stanley… I have to go.” Ford feels his voice crack slightly. “I’m sorry. I have to go somewhere very far away. I can’t come treasure hunting.”

“Far? How far?”

“Very, very far. Another dimension. I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll come back someday, though. Even if it takes thirty years, okay?”

Stanley’s face scrunches up. “Promise? Whaddya mean, promise?” His face gets red and his hands ball up. “You already promised you’d go treasure hunting with me, an’ now—“ Oh no, thinks Ford, Stanley is going to cry. He’s going to cry. “You said, we would go treasure hunting, just you, an’ me! You can’t leave me! You can’t leave— “  He rushes forwards, sobbing, beating his little fists ineffectually against Ford’s legs. Ford just stands there. What is he going to say?


	2. Bad Dream #2

Ford comes out of the portal absolutely furious. Who was idiotic enough to reactivate it? Who knows what consequences it could have? Actually, he already knows who would be stupid enough to reactivate it. He is going to punch Stanley in the face. But when he looks up, the portal room is completely empty.

“Hello?” he calls. It is silent as the grave.

He walks slowly towards his desk. Papers litter it. His foot kicks something and he looks down. It’s Journal 1. The other two sit nearby. His heart clenches.

Upstairs, for a moment he thinks he is in the wrong house. The room appears to have been converted into a tacky little gift shop. But this is definitely the front room he remembers, and, looking around, he even recognizes some of his old belongings. He wanders around the rest of the house. In one room, the TV is on. In another, a phone dangles from its hook. All he hears when he lifts it to his ear is a dial tone. Nearby, a cup of coffee sits. It is spilled a bit but still warm. Ford turns the TV off and puts the phone back on the hook but doesn’t touch the coffee at all. He stands in the middle of the room and feels uncomfortable. It is so still. He walks outside and, after a moment of hesitation, heads towards town. He notices as he walks that he can’t see a single squirrel, bird, anything. The only noise is the wind in the trees and the crunch of his own footsteps.

He hangs back a bit as he reaches the town. Before he even sees it, he knows it will be empty. A couple of cars idle. A flag flaps in the breeze. He realizes just how much has changed since he was here last as he looks down the storefronts. He sits down on a step and stares at the sidewalk. He thinks he’s going to cry. He doesn’t.

It’s a long time before Ford stands up again. He looks towards the floating cliffs and begins to walk. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He knows there’s no use going anywhere. He knows, and perhaps knew from the moment he stepped into the empty room, that he is completely, totally alone.


	3. Interlude

Ford tosses and turns in his bed.

“I hate bad dreams,” he says to the dark room.

“I know somebody who can help with that,” a familiar voice answers.

He sighs and buries his head under his pillow. He should have guessed that he was still dreaming. “Go away,” he calls to the voice.

The voice finds this hilarious and the whole room shakes to its laugh.


	4. Bad Dream #3

Ford wakes up groggily, blinking against harsh fluorescent light. He’s in a hospital bed. A doctor is standing over him, smiling, and his family stands tensely off to the side.

“We can remove your bandages and take a look now,” says the smiling man. Ford is confused. Bandages? Bandages? He becomes aware that his hands feel stiff and heavy and lifts them to his face to see them wrapped in gauze. Why are they wrapped in gauze?

The doctor takes them carefully in his hands and begins unwrapping the layers and Ford is almost scared to look. He’s so scared to see what’s underneath those bandages. What if it’s awful? What if his hands are mutilated? What if he’ll never be able to draw again, write again—

The gauze comes off and Ford stares at his hands. They’re totally fine. He is almost relieved.  But wait, no, something is wrong, something he can’t place. Something is very wrong.

He counts his fingers.

He has five on each hand.

The doctor is still smiling. “Look! Perfectly normal!” Why is he smiling so much? Ford feels sick. He looks up at his family. They’re staring at him. They’re waiting, expectantly, for his reaction. His parents are so happy for their normal, normal son. His mother is smiling. His father is smiling.

Stanley is not smiling.

Ford looks down again at his hands and everyone stands, silent, waiting for him to say something.

He screams and won’t stop screaming.


	5. Bad Dream #4

Ford steps out of the portal into what looks like a disaster zone. Smoke and dust billow through the air. Cables and boards litter the ground. A section of the ceiling appears to have caved in. Someone is coughing. A girl is crying. Someone is yelling. For him?

“Mister Pines?” But the young man who speaks isn’t looking at him. None of the three seems to have even noticed him. They’re gathered around a fallen beam, shouting. The girl is crouched down, tugging at something sticking out from underneath the massive slab of wood. As the smoke clears, Ford finally sees what it is. It’s a bloodied hand.

“Stanley?” His voice is a strangled whisper, but it somehow cuts directly through the chaos and three sets of eyes turn to meet his. The boy looks numb and a gash above his eyebrow drips crimson. The young man looks on the verge of panic. But the girl stares at him, cheeks streaked with tears, and speaks.

“Help,” she sobs. She runs forwards and tugs at his coat in desperation. The other two watch, uncomprehending, as she pleads, “Please help, that’s my Grunkle, my Grunkle Stan, I know it is because he wouldn’t lie to me and he’s hurt! Please help him! Please…” but Ford doesn’t move. He doesn’t think he could if he tried.


	6. Bad Dream #5

This time, when he turns on the penlight and gets his first good look at Stanley’s face, he knows he’s made a mistake. The eyes that look out from the familiar visage are alien, and the smile that spreads across the face is unnatural.

“Nice try,” a voice that Ford will never be able to get out of his head says. The fingers that wrap around his wrist, the foot that throws him to the ground, are inhumanly strong. A stranger is walking around in his brother’s skin. It is a demon that grins down at him.

“But guess what, Six Fingers? You’re too late.”


	7. Interlude 2

Ford knows he’s dreaming, but he’s eight again and hiding in a custodian’s closet at school. If he comes out, they’ll beat him up again. So he sits in with the mops and buckets and hopes he’ll wake up soon.

“You dream of the portal a lot,” says a voice. It is coming from a chalk triangle drawn on the floor. There are voices outside; the bullies have found him. He braces his back against the door.

“So what?” he replies. The boys are pounding furiously at the wooden door, shouting for him. He wishes they’d leave. All that noise is giving him a headache.

“You know what you never dream of?” the triangle asks. Ford is silent. “What’s behind the portal.”

The pounding continues, but it’s not the bullies now. “Maybe I have a reason for that,” Ford responds. Now it is Fiddleford on the other side of the door. He wants to come in.

“I wonder what it could be,” says the triangle gleefully. Ford picks up a nearby bucket of soapy water and pours it onto the chalk, watching as it smudges and vanishes. Fiddleford continues banging on the door, but Ford will not let him in. He knows that his eyes will be wide and unseeing. Ford leans against the door and hopes against hope to wake up.


	8. Bad Dream #6

The thing that comes out of the portal is not Stanford Pines. Perhaps it once was, but if so, that was a long time ago. Yes, it has a face like his, but the eyes are all wrong. And although the body is humanoid, it moves like nothing else does. It moves like nothing else should.

Fiddleford Hadron McGucket spent ten seconds in the portal and came out a changed man. Stanford spent thirty years in the portal and came out no longer human.

The four people in the room somehow know at once that something is very, very wrong. They can sense it. They can sense that something has entered this world that should have never existed in the first place. They know that they have unleashed something terrible. They do not yet understand how terrible.

The thing that was once a man scans the faces of the four people. Two children. A young man. And one familiar face. It does not care. It has been waiting for this for so, so long. So long.

In a bed in the Mystery Shack, Ford groans and stirs in his sleep, but somewhere in his dreams, that which was once him smiles and, with a noise unlike anything, pounces.


End file.
